From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men.
BARBARA KINGSOLVERI never think that anything I’m writing is bluntly political in any way. I’m not going for commentary.
More Barbara Kingsolver Quotes
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They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.
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We’re surrounded by mandates, and I believe that literature should be mandate-free. I feel very strongly about that.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.
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When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke.
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To think is not always to see.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.
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Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.
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Poetry feels like a country I visit without a passport, where I look around furtively, grab hold of something precious, and try to smuggle it back across the border. Any poem I get written down feels like contraband to me.
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It is harrowing for me to try to teach 20-year-old students, who earnestly want to improve their writing. The best I can think to tell them is: Quit smoking, and observe posted speed limits. This will improve your odds of getting old enough to be wise.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
…prodigal summer, the season of extravagant procreation. It could wear out everything in its path with its passionate excesses, but nothing alive with wings or a heart or a seed curled into itself in the ground could resist welcoming it back when it came.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember.
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I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.
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Humans can be fairly ridiculous animals.
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There was a roaring in my ears and I lost track of what they were saying. I believe it was the physical manifestation of unbearable grief.
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School is about two parts ABCs to fifty parts Where Do I Stand in the Great Pecking Order of Humankind.
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Like kids who only ever get socks for Christmas, but still believe with all their hearts in Santa.
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Stop a minute, right where you are. Relax your shoulders, shake your head and spine like a dog shaking off cold water. Tell that imperious voice in your head to be still.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
He needs to go rub his soul against life.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Eaters must understand, how we eat determines how the world is used.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER -
Feeling that morality has nothing to do with the way you use the resources of the world is an idea that can’t persist much longer. If it does, then we won’t.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER